The Player is Actually Interesting Now

07 Feb 2011

Currently, I’m in the middle of working on the player class. It just got a lot more complex without much extra code, because now I am actually using the wheel that I had my player’s main box sitting on. Up to this point, I was using it simply to smooth traversal over platforms that were directly next to each other, because jerky movement occurred when something like a square with harsh vertices hit the seams. But now, the movement is defined by rotating that circle, rather than simply applying a force pointing left or right, so I instantly get a couple of neat effects - first, if the player jumps, it isn’t possible to move in the air, because all that will be happening is the wheel rotating in the air. I do want the player to be able to move a bit in the air so I’ll define some special cases for that, but the feel of the movement seems a lot better to me now.

For now, I am going to define a standard jump height and then not let the player jump again until back on the ground, because right now it’s just possible to float forever. I might keep that in as a debug option for myself, because it’s nice to be able to go anywhere, but I’d like to be pretty much done with the player class for now, so after I get the air movement and jumping taken care of I’ll move on to some more new light classes, and parallax scrolling with some background and foreground art to spice up how things currently look.